From the beginning of your project you should be clear about what is in scope and out of scope. This will set the ground rules and expectations for stakeholders. You can increase the likelihood of acceptance of your project by attempting to negotiate or influence your stakeholders into fulfilling project goals. Furthermore, be ahead of issues and discuss potential threats to manage risks appropriately. The open feedback will allow for more efficient resolution to known issues and better completion of your project.

To actively manage your stakeholders’ expectations, create a register or list of all relevant stakeholders. This list should illustrate both the levels of interest and influence a stakeholder possesses. Maintaining thorough issue and change logs can be effective when you need to communicate to your stakeholders. Having a succinct and thorough project management plan that covers the project scope, goals and ground rules can help reduce problems in your communication with stakeholders by defining a template for success. Read the Complete Article

It often helps to think of this process as finding what is needed to satisfy the stakeholders and creating a document to reflect this understanding. These requirements become the basis for your Work Breakdown Structure, so need to be detailed enough for accurate measurement once the project is underway.

Since this process is defining your stakeholder’s expectations, it follows that an input is your stakeholder register. In addition to containing the stakeholder’s information, it would also be beneficial to detail their influence, interest and requirements. The other input for this process is the project charter. The high-level view of the project found in your charter can be thought of as a baseline to form your requirements onto. There are a variety of tools you can use to collect and document these requirements.

The sequence activities process takes all the activities you defined in the Define Activities process and orders them by precedence. You are creating a map or diagram that illustrates the relationship between these activities and identifying the order in which they need to be done. It is important to note that you are not creating the schedule itself during this process, and therefore do not assign any start or finish dates to these activities.

Your inputs for this process include: activity list, activity attributes, milestone list, project scope statement and organizational process assets. Your activity list contains your schedule activities and needs to be arranged into the order they should be performed for your diagram. Your activity attributes provides additional insight into which activities need to be performed before others. Your milestone list provides you with key milestones that might influence the order of your activities. Read the Complete Article